Figure 1.

Growth of plant 'miRNA' and 'miRNA Target' in PubMed. In last decade, miRNA changed to be a hot research topic. It's impossible to establish
the exact number of how many labs are studying this small molecule and how much funding
is spent. However, the number of relevant papers can broadly reflect this trend. We
then collect plant miRNA related articles indexed by PubMed (collected on Jun.13th,
2011). Statistical results show that these articles grow in an exponential way.